ASRock 4Core1600 P35 WiFi+ S775 Motherboard Review

ASRock is stepping up the process of product introduction. 4Core 1600 P35 WiFi+ with overclocking features including DDR2/DDR3 surprises a few of us. Full featured with Firewire, Cross-Fire, WiFi and the traditional parallel port and eSATA, and the support of the upcoming to Intel Penryn, and Wolfdale.

BIOS

BIOS:

Much approved BIOS! This may mark the first time that ASRock offers decent CPU and Memory voltage. However, memory divider remains in the use of pin jumper setup. I have had some tough time in dealing with the BIOS, after more than two weeks on and off toying with it; I finally got the hang of the "unique" behavior.

Firstly, when any of the BIOS settings is "incorrectly set" FSB, Memory timing or voltage in overclocking, it would have power on and off sequences in booting the BIOS rather than the normal boot up you are accustomed to. Secondly, my monitor screen goes "nuts" when memory divider (pin jumpers) are pinned wrong. I have to unplug the power supply, reset CMOS and wait for at least 15 to 30 minutes before I could restart the process.

The CPU is "pin-modded" to FSB266, I will explain later on the reason why this was needed.

The multi or CPU ratio is locked; the original BIOS came with the board allowed the ratio change and it was "unlocked". Too bad that I did not take a screen shot, the original or media sample BIOS was flashed because it did not support FSB800 CPU, hence, I had to flash it to new version.

CPU voltage tops out at 1.6v, plenty enough for C2D/Quad. Memory voltage could reach 2.72v, a dangerously high limit.

NB, SB and VTT have four settings without value:

Auto

Low

Medium

High

Highest

The BIOS settings are pretty straight forward. It gets kind of confusing when used with jumpers (previous page) for memory divider and type of memory used.